New Delhi: “Small and Medium sized businesses from India have a great potential to succeed in the global ecommerce market and should rapidly adopt ecommerce or risk losing out to competitors from other countries.” These were the main conclusions from the Ecommerce Success 2016 workshops held in Mumbai and New Delhi. The workshop conclusions supported a recent United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD) observation that, developing countries must grasp the opportunity of e-commerce – worth around $22.1 trillion in 2015 – or risk falling behind. The objective of the workshops was to encourage SMEs to adopt ecommerce and to provide them with strategic tips for success.

SMEs from more than ten sectors with a high potential for ecommerce participated in the workshops, which had focussed sessions on B2B and B2C ecommerce. The workshops were organized by SME MaXX with IDFC bank as the Principal Partner and included faculty from Alibaba and Amazon. Attendees had the opportunity to analyse the ecommerce potential of their companies and gain valuable tips and practical insights in to the working of global ecommerce marketplaces. The faculty shared success stories of companies and individuals from India who had made millions of dollars through effective use of ecommerce.

SMEs recognized the high potential of ecommerce to drive their future growth and identified the lack of ecommerce trained manpower and support systems as a major roadblock to their ecommerce expansion plans. Other key highlights of the workshop were: The product return rates in USA are way lower than that in India as e-commerce is now a way of life in the USA. The “necessity factor” is much higher than the “curiosity factor” and product returns are more likely to be due to a genuine reason.

The USA offers a huge ecommerce market for the Indian garment and textile companies. Amazon Will Be the No. 1 U.S. clothing retailer very soon as per a Bloomberg report. A simple but powerful strategy to success on global B2B marketplaces like Alibaba.com is to log in to your account every day and answer customer queries in real time. The “Ecommerce Success” workshops will be conducted in other major Indian cities in 2017 with the objective of enabling a large number of Indian SMEs to succeed with ecommerce domestically as well as internationally. More information on the workshops is available from www.smemaxx.com.